Cupid's Arrow

by Isabelle Merlin

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Forest hunt

  Dreamcatcher

  The chariot

  Words of a ghost

  The green road

  Bellerive Manor

  Dream book

  Heart magic

  Hunting call

  White deer

  At first sight

  The Lady's House

  Kingdom of peace

  Dreaming Arthur

  Haunted

  Reprise

  Devil's arithmetic

  High king

  Chapter One perfect day

  Cold fury

  Gone

  An outer mirror

  Wasteland

  Return to Bellerive

  At Mary's well

  Siege perilous

  Quest to nowhere

  Calm before the storm

  Blood moon

  Wolf hunt

  If only

  Devil's vow

  Otherworld

  The garden

  Blooms in the wasteland

  The once and future king

  Mysterious fire claims killer's life

  Three Wishes

  Pop Princess

  Bright Angel

  About the Author

  The first stories Isabelle Merlin remembers are the traditional fairytales told to her by her French grandmother. Later, she heard family stories, which proved to her that magic and romance and terror don't only appear in fairytales: like the romantic story of the beautiful ancestor who caught the eye of the Sun-King, Louis XIV; or the amazing story of the wily ancestor who went from being a poor peasant to a multimillionaire; or the tragic story of the curse of madness and misfortune that pursued other ancestors; or the spooky story of the chain-rattling ghost that haunted the family home deep in the green countryside of France. It's no wonder that she grew up with a head full of stories and a burning desire to become a writer. Isabelle lives in Australia with her family.

  To find out more about Isabelle, visit

  http://isabelle.merlin.googlepages.com

  Also by Isabelle Merlin

  Three Wishes

  Pop Princess

  Cupid's Arrow

  Isabelle Merlin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Cupid's Arrow

  ePub ISBN 9781864714401

  Kindle ISBN 9781864716801

  Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3,100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  Sydney New York Toronto

  London Auckland Johannesburg

  First published by Random House Australia in 2009

  Copyright © Isabelle Merlin 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at

  www.randomhouse.com.au/offices

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Author: Merlin, Isabelle.

  Title: Cupid's Arrow / Isabelle Merlin.

  ISBN: 978 1 74166 437 9 (pbk.)

  Target audience: For secondary school age.

  Dewey number: A823.4

  Cover and internal illustrations by Kerrie Hess

  Cover design by Design Cherry

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed and bound by Griffin Press, South Australia

  Random House Australia uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Forest hunt

  I'm running. Running very fast. Running for my life. The breath is whistling in my throat, my heart's pounding, my feet are on fire.

  Someone's after me. I can't see who it is, but I can hear them. I daren't waste time by turning around. I know, whoever they are, they mean me harm. I know that just as I know I must try to get away.

  It's dark in here. Not dark dark – not night, that is – but dimly lit. The dim green-gold light of a forest in full leaf. Big trees. Small trees. Bushes. Vines. Stones on the path. Mossy patches. Slippery dead leaves. Things to trip you up, to stumble, to fall... and then ...

  I'm running. Branches whip against me, stones fly out from under my feet. Cold sweat is pouring off me, making me feel clammy, making me shiver in the midst of my running. My scalp is pricked all over with needles of fear. The faster I go, the more I can hear them coming, the more I can feel their presence: an evil presence that means me harm. I know they will hunt me down like a wild beast till I am exhausted, unable to do anything anymore to protect myself.

  Suddenly, something looms in front of me. A big grey pile of something. A large ruined house I think at first, and then, as I come closer, I see it's a tumbled pile of big grey rocks, threaded with yellow and green lichen. Boulders, really. Tall and rounded, with openings in among them. Like a terrified animal, I head for them. I can hide there. I can escape my hunter. I can.

  I dive in among the rocks. I slip, recover, then slide down into the dark shadows of the openings. I crouch there, so frightened that I'm almost beyond fear. My body feels disconnected from my mind, floating in some strange limbo where there's nothing, no thought, no feeling, just waiting.

  My hunter is almost there. Running footsteps, coming closer. Ragged breath. A crack of twigs, then sudden silence. And from the shadows I see something at last. Just a glimpse. A hand. No, two. Holding something. Pulling something back. My God, it's a bow. A bow? And in the middle of the bowstring, poised to fly, an arrow, aimed directly at me. I'm going to die. I know it. I just know it. I can't help it. I open my mouth and scream ...

  I wake up with a sickening jump, head aching from the scream still resonating inside me. I haven't really screamed. Not in reality. Only in the dream. But I'm covered in a cold sweat, my heart's pounding, there are tears running down my face. I lie there trying to calm myself, forcing my pulse rate down, trying to tell myself it was just a bad dream. This is the second time I've had this nightmare. The first was a week ago. And it's so vivid. I haven't had a nightmare like this for ages. The kind that makes you afraid to close your eyes and go to sleep.

  At one time, when I was a little kid, about seven or eight, I had nightmares a lot. Witches, sharks, hungry lions, the lot. They were so bad and came so often Mum took me to a psychologist. A particular sort of psychologist, who specialised in dreams and nightmares. I had to go through all these tests. The psychologist asked all sorts of questions, about what was going on at school, at home
, in my head.

  I was a little kid. You're not too good at explaining things when you're little. You know you have feelings, but you don't know why. I mean, you don't understand them. The psychologist had a theory that there was some deep underlying fear in my life and she tried and tried to get at it. But I wasn't afraid. Not of anything, not really.

  School was fine. I had good friends, I got on okay with my teachers, my school work was okay, and I wasn't being bullied, at least not then (it did happen to me later, in high school – but that's another story). And Mum and I got on well. I didn't miss my father because I'd never known him. He had left us before I was even born. I was a bit curious about him, sure, but because Mum didn't like talking about him, I didn't know much, apart from his name – Tom Mallory. It didn't worry me, not really, beyond the curiosity. Still, the psychologist probed at that, trying to find out if that was the reason for the bad dreams, but in the end she decided it wasn't. She told my mother I was just a highly imaginative child and if I channelled that imagination, then I'd probably be okay. I could start by writing down my dreams in a special book and then maybe later try to turn them into stories. The bad dreams wouldn't stop straightaway, but they would be tamed. Slowly.

  Well, I wasn't the sort of little kid who liked writing stories, though I did like reading them. You could hardly not, if you were Mum's kid. She's a bookseller, you see. Not the regular, new-release sort. She sells old books, ordinary second-hand ones and also valuable, really old stuff. Antique books. She specialises in myths, legends, fairytales, stuff about magic and strange beliefs, that sort of thing. There have always been books like that knocking around our place and, as a kid, I read a lot of them. These days I don't read fairytales and myths and stuff, I prefer crime novels and thrillers but, anyway, you get the picture.

  Mum, who was very keen for all this to work, gave me a really nice thick notebook that one of her international customers had sent her once, an expensive one with a beautiful leather cover, and a thick ribbon around it. Because it was so beautiful, I really wanted to use it, so I wrote down the dreams, what I could remember of them anyway, which often was just a line or two but I never turned them into stories, because I didn't know how and didn't really want to.

  Gradually, over the years, the pages of my dream book began to fill up, and the bad dreams did slowly get better, and then became less frequent. By the time I hit my teens, despite having had one or two actual bad experiences – like that bullying episode – I hardly ever had nightmares anymore. But I've got into the habit of writing down my dreams – the good ones as well as the bad ones – and so I keep doing that. Although, hardly ever these days.

  Because it was so thick to begin with, the notebook's still got a fair few pages left in it. But most of the later entries aren't really that exciting. Like I say, I've rarely had nightmares in the last few years and the good dreams are okay but not all that spectacular, hardly worth the trouble of writing down, except for one or two, which I prefer to keep private anyway. Just in case Mum forgets I'm sixteen and entitled to privacy.

  I hadn't written this nightmare down though – not the first time I had it, I mean, a week ago. I hadn't written it down because, actually, I couldn't bring myself to do it. Now I lay there, my pulse returning to normal, and thought I'd been an idiot. If I'd written it down it might not have occurred again. Or maybe it would. Who knows? The dream book's not magic, just a tool. Anyway, I should do it now. I'll get up, pull out my dream book and ...

  There was a rap on the door.

  'Fleur!' It was Mum, sounding rather testy. 'Fleur, get up! It's nearly eight-thirty!'

  I groaned, rolled over. 'But it's the first day of the holidays.'

  She opened the door and came striding in, flicking open the curtains impatiently. Sunlight came flooding in. 'Surely you haven't forgotten you're meant to open up the shop for me this morning?' Then she paused, and looked more closely at me. Her voice changed. 'You look pale, Fleur. Are you feeling okay?'

  I nearly told her I felt a bit sick because I wanted to get out of looking after the shop, but then I felt mean, cos I knew she had this important appointment at the bank. I said, 'I'm fine. Just had a bit of a bad dream, that's all.'

  'Oh dear,' she said, a little vaguely. Over the years, since I'd got better at coping with the dreams, she'd stopped worrying about it too, and I'd got out of the habit of telling her if I'd had any particular sort of dream. 'I hope it wasn't too bad.'

  'Not at all,' I lied, feeling a strange little tremor, a little twist of fear, as I did so.

  Dreamcatcher

  Mum's bookshop is a couple of streets away from our house. I made it there in time and found a customer already waiting on the doorstep. He was one of Mum's regulars, a retired lecturer called Dr Geoff Troy, who used to teach Medieval History at our local university, and who haunts the bookshop like it's his second home. He hangs around for ages, browsing, but nearly always buys something, even if it's just a tattered paperback, and Mum sometimes sits down with him for a chat and a cup of coffee if the shop isn't busy.

  'Your dear mother is unwell?' he asked me anxiously as I unlocked the door. I think he's got a bit of a crush on Mum, though he looks about a hundred, with thin white hair under a tweedy hat and he uses a walking stick. Nice old guy, though. Real polite. Gentle. Sort of sweet.

  I smiled at him. 'She's fine, Dr Troy. Had an important appointment with the bank, though, and so she asked me to open up.'

  'Oh dear, I hope there are no problems. Bankers can be such hard men.'

  He can be a bit of a stickybeak, too, old Dr Troy. I suppose his intense interest in other people's lives comes from not having much of one himself. His wife died years ago and his kids don't visit often and a lot of his old friends from uni have passed on too. So he's a bit lonely.

  'It's okay, Dr Troy. Nothing Mum can't deal with.' I knew she was going to ask the bank for another loan, to extend and renovate the shop, and I knew she wasn't sure if they'd agree. The shop does okay but not all that brilliantly. Mum loves her books and her customers so much she finds it hard to ask the inflated prices other book dealers demand. But she has a good reputation and over the years she's built up this great client list, not only in Australia but all over the world too.

  Dr Troy gave me a relieved smile and limped off to look at his favourite shelves on medieval history and legends, while I fired up the computer and tidied up the desk. I listened to the messages on the answering machine but there was nothing urgent. I logged onto our server and checked the emails. There were three or four from clients, ordering new books, and I printed those out because Mum likes to have a paper record of them as well. I checked the shop inventory to make sure the books that had been ordered were actually in stock, and got them down from the shelves so nobody else would buy them before we could send them off.

  Time passed. Dr Troy had found a book to leaf through and was sitting in his favourite armchair at the sunny back of the shop, half-snoozing, half-reading. I made him a cup of tea. Nobody else came in. The shop was very quiet. I had done all the work I was meant to do, so I logged onto my Facebook page. I'm getting a bit sick of Facebook though, to tell you the truth, cos you get too many stupid messages asking you to do dumb stuff like send a snow globe or 'become' a werewolf and bite people or take some quiz or the other that automatically sends itself to all your friends and gets them really annoyed. So I didn't spend much time on that. Mum still wasn't back, and Dr Troy read and snoozed gently in his chair, and no-one else came in, so I went to Google, hesitated a bit, then put in 'dream interpretation'.

  Up came heaps of sites – from scientific ones to way-out ones. The study of dreams and nightmares is a very unusual thing. See, no-one, not even the most hard-headed scientist, can deny dreams and nightmares exist, and that they may mean something. So you often get, even on the scientific sites, stuff that really seems quite mystical.

  There are quite a lot of sites too that offer interpretations of dreams, and I've looked up a f
ew of them in the past. But there was a new one I hadn't seen before. It was at http://dreamingholmes.googlepages.com, and was called The Casebook of Dreaming Holmes – Holmes as in Sherlock, I suppose. The description said it was the website of Dreaming Holmes, dream detective and interpreter, so just out of curiosity, I clicked onto it.

  Everyone has dreams. Everyone has nightmares, read the first words on the home page. But to most people, the why and how and who of dreams and nightmares are a mystery too deep to be solved. And because of that, they can haunt and disturb us more than they need to. Enter Dreaming Holmes, dream detective extraordinaire!

  It went on to say: Send your dreams and nightmares to me, and I will explain what they mean. Free service, no obligation, and discretion guaranteed!

  After that came the email address to send to. I stared at the page, then clicked onto the other parts of the site. In the 'About' section Dreaming Holmes described himself as a 'human dreamcatcher'. He said he was born in Scotland but then emigrated to Canada as a child, that he'd worked as a police officer for a while but then did a degree in psychology and now practised as a psychologist. There were interesting general sections on dreams and nightmares, with stuff I'd never really thought about, like how they came in different shapes, such as snapshots or scenes or stories, and how there were genres in them, just like in literature.

  There was also an intriguing section called 'Some Cases', which had descriptions of dreams people had sent Dreaming Holmes, and his interpretation of them. One of the people was a girl of my own age and she'd had a nightmare sort of like mine. Dreaming Holmes' explanation was not mystical or scary at all. Sort of sensible, really. Perhaps my nightmare could be interpreted like that too, and then I could stop thinking about it. I could send it to Dreaming Holmes. It'd be like writing it down in my dream book, only better, because someone else would explain it. Someone I didn't know, who didn't know me, who wouldn't worry, like Mum would if I told her. I wouldn't send it through my normal email address. I'd get another, a Gmail or hotmail one, and send it anonymously. Just in case it was some kind of scam. You never know, with the internet. There are all sorts out there, and Mum's always telling me to be careful. Dreaming Holmes sounded okay, but you never know.